“Ms. Fuller…” The persistent click-clacking that Nellie presumed was Martha’s keyboard momentarily paused. “Am I correct in understanding that your plan is to… camp… in a van on Alburn Systems’ private property for two months?”
“That’s correct. But Dolores is very self-contained. I’ve actually written up the composting situation for an outdoor living blog, if you’d like the link?—”
The click-clacking resumed, rapid and decisive, like Morse code. “There is a cottage.” More clicking. A pause. More clicking. “On the eastern tree line. It’s unoccupied for”—click—“fourteen months. It has power, a functioning kitchen, and a queen-size bed.”
“Oh, I’m perfectly fine in Dolores, honestly.”
“Ms. Fuller.” Something in Martha’s tone conveyed an entire negotiation without shifting in volume or temperature by a single degree. “The cottage is available. Using it would be”—the smallest of pauses—“preferable.”
Nellie thought about Dolores. Her lavender air freshener, her characterful engine, the way you had to sort of encourage the passenger window to close in cold weather. She thought about a bed with springs.
“I suppose a cottage doesn’t sound all that bad,” she said. “Thank you, Martha.”
“Directions will be sent to you. Is there anything else?”
“No, that’s… Actually, the composting situation for Dolores while she’s parked on-site?—”
“Goodbye, Ms. Fuller.”
The cottage sat at the edge of the eastern tree line exactly the way Martha described. It had a stone foundation, cedar siding gone silver with weather, and a porch that sagged in precisely the right place. Nellie stood in the doorway for thirty seconds before she registered that she was smiling widely enough to hurt her cheeks. She couldn’t help it. The smell alone—old wood, pine resin, the faint memory of a woodstove that hadn’t been lit since last winter. She was constitutionally incapable of not loving it.
Inside was a main room with a stone fireplace, a kitchen with a propane range and wooden cupboards worn smooth at the pulls, a bathroom with white subway tile that had probably been installed sometime in the eighties and survived purely by virtue of being fundamentally decent. The bedroom was at the back, with a window looking directly into the canopy.
She unpacked with a thoroughness that three years in a converted van had made instinctive. Field gear on the closet hooks. Sample collection kits arranged on the kitchen table in the order she’d need them. Laptop plugged into the wall. She stood watching the battery indicator climb like it owedher something, because after three years of managing Dolores’s temperamental power inverter, it genuinely did.
Then she went outside to look at the land.
The eastern tree line dropped from the cottage in a long slope toward what her topo maps suggested was a seasonal creek drainage. She pushed through the understory—boots finding the give of deep duff, sword ferns parting at her knees—and started noticing things: ferns thick enough to indicate stable soil moisture across seasons and nurse logs at two separate points, old and deeply colonized, built up over decades of decomposition. She crouched beside one and pressed two fingers into the moss: saturated. The initial survey had not noted this.
She followed the land downslope until she heard water.
Not the thin trickle of snowmelt chasing gravity down a drainage ditch—she knew that sound—but something steadier, more permanent. She pushed through a wall of salal and nearly walked straight into a stream four feet across, running clear over a gravel bed. There were caddisfly larvae on the undersides of three consecutive rocks. She’d need conductivity tests to frame the formal argument, but the gravel composition alone suggested a permanent water feature; her gut, honed by eight years of reading watersheds, knew this was significant. She pulled out her notebook and started writing.
Nellie had been back at the cottage twenty minutes when a car appeared on the access road—not a sleek electric, this time, but something black and obnoxiously large. The woman who stepped out was smooth. That was the word Nellie plucked from her gut, exact and immediate, the waywrongcame to her when a data set was off. Mid-fifties, good suit, a face arranged in an expression of geniality that started at the surface and didn’t reach much further. Silver-templed. The kind of beautiful that worked best in quarterly reports.
“Ms. Fuller.” She offered a confident, too-firm handshake. “Gina Marsh, head of development at Alburn Systems. I wanted to introduce myself and walk you through the ground rules for your time on-site.”
“Pleasure,” Nellie said. “That’s very helpful.”
The rules were fairly simple: no heavy equipment on her part, no chemical applications without written Alburn authorization, no access to the northern sector without a company representative present, and all survey data submitted through Alburn’s legal office before any third-party publication or disclosure.
Nellie listened to every word. She asked one clarifying question about the northern sector restriction. Gina’s answer was fluent, thorough, and contained no actual information.
“Any other questions at all?” she asked.
“No,” she said pleasantly. “I think I’ve got everything I need.”
They smiled at each other, and Nellie watched her car reverse back down the road.
Then she called Paloma.
“There’s a head of development. I don’t like her,” she said, the moment Paloma picked up.
“Tell me.”
“Gina Marsh. She came out personally to give me the ground rules.”
“What are the rules?”
